Pope Francis described the pursuit of money as “the dung of the devil” and offered a heartfelt apology for what the Catholic Church did to the native peoples of South America during a visit to Bolivia Friday.

On the second stage of the three-country tour of his home continent, the Argentinean Pope criticised the iniquities and excesses of capitalism in a speech which bolstered his reputation as a guardian of the poor. It will, however, ring alarm bells among conservatives, especially in the United States, which he will visit in September.

Quoting a fourth century bishop, he said unbridled capitalism was destroying the planet: “Today, the scientific community realises what the poor have long told us: harm, perhaps irreversible harm, is being done to the ecosystem.

“And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called ’the dung of the devil’.”

During the speech in the city of Santa Cruz, he said: “Once capital becomes an idol and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socio-economic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home.”

He called for the poor to be given the “sacred rights” of work, housing and land. “Let us not be afraid to say it: we want change, real change, structural change,” he said.

The 78-year-old pontiff criticized an economic system that “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature” and singled out for criticism “corporations, loan agencies, certain ’free trade’ treaties, and the imposition of measures of ’austerity’ which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor.”

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In one of the most impassioned speeches of his two-year pontificate, the Jesuit pontiff also asked forgiveness for the sins committed by the Roman Catholic Church in its treatment of native tribes during the colonial era.

“I say this to you with regret: many grave sins were committed against the native peoples of America in the name of God. I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offences of the Church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America. There was sin and an abundant amount of it.”

The Pope continued his outspoken remarks by denouncing what he called the “genocide” of Christians in the Middle East, describing as “a third world war” the terrorism and sectarianism tearing apart the region.

“In this third world war, waged piecemeal, which we are now experiencing, a form of genocide is taking place, and it must end.”

Hundreds of thousands of people filled a park in Ecuador’s main port city Monday for Pope Francis’ first big event of his three-nation South American tour, hoping for a glimpse of Latin America’s first pope returning to his home soil for a mass dedicated to the family.

VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty ImagesPope Francis arrives to celebrate an open-air mass at Samanes Park in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on July 6, 2015.

Many pilgrims spent the night outdoors, and some walked for miles to reach the park on Guayaquil’s northern outskirts where the crowd sang hymns and sought pockets of shade to keep cool amid the scorching sun and high humidity. Firefighters sprayed them with water hoses to provide relief.

“I’m tired. I’m hungry, I haven’t slept but I’m also full of emotion and joy in my heart,” said Vicente Huilcatoma, a 47-year-old retired police officer who walked 40 kilometres to reach Samanes Park.

The Vatican had originally estimated more than 1 million people would turn out for the mass, and government organizers put the crowd at above 1 million people in the hour before the service began. But Gabriel Almeida, the government spokesman at the scene, rolled back the estimate to several hundred thousand after officials viewed aerial images of the area.

Across the park, Ecuadoran national flags and papal banners waved above the enormous sea of people, who were divided into quadrants that Francis looped around slowly on his popemobile to cheers of “Francisco! Francisco!”

In his homily, Francis praised families as the bedrock of society – “the nearest hospital, the first school for the young, the best home for the elderly” – and said miracles are performed every day inside a family out of love. But he said sometimes the love and happiness runs out.

“How many women, sad and lonely, wonder when love left, when it slipped away from their lives?” he asked. “How many elderly people feel left out of family celebrations, cast aside and longing each day for a little love?”

Francis has dedicated the first two years of his pontificate to family issues, giving weekly catechism lessons on different aspects of family life and inviting the entire church to study ways to provide better pastoral care for Catholic families, people who are divorced, gays and families in “nontraditional” situations.

A preliminary meeting of bishops on these issues ended last year in bitter divisions between liberals and conservatives, particularly over ministering to gays and to Catholics who divorce and remarry outside of the church. Church teaching holds that Catholics who enter into a second marriage without having the first one annulled cannot receive Communion.

AP Photo/Fernando VergaraA group of young people wave flags representing the colours of Vatican City as they wait for the arrival of Pope Francis at Samanes Park in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Monday, July 6, 2015.

In his homily Monday, Francis said he hoped the second meeting of bishops on family life, scheduled for October, would come up with “concrete solutions to the many difficult and significant challenges facing families in our time.”

“I ask you to pray fervently for this intention, so that Christ can take even what might seem to us impure, scandalous or threatening, and turn it … into a miracle.”

AP Photo/Fernando VergaraA woman holds a balloon bouquet in Vatican colours and a placard with an image of Pope Francis with a message that reads in Spanish; "Welcome to Guayaquil, We pray for you," as she waits for the arrival of Francis to celebrate a Mass at the Samanes Park in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Monday, July 6, 2015.

“Families today need miracles!” he added.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Francis wasn’t referring to the gay or divorce issue specifically but was making a more general reference that he hoped the bishops would “help the church chart this path of leaving a situation of sin to one of grace.”

On his arrival in Guayaquil, the pontiff allowed several acolytes on the tarmac to take selfies with him. He then headed to the Shrine of the Divine Mercy, where 2,000 invitees gathered including child cancer patients, residents of homes for the elderly abandoned by their families and some of Guayaquil’s poorest people.

He told those gathered that he would pray for them “and I won’t charge you a thing. All I ask, please, is that you pray for me.”

The crowd in Los Samanes park was festive, with young and old overjoyed at seeing the first pope in their lives.

“I’ll ask the pope to intercede so that God gives me my health,” said 90-year-old Guillermina Aveiga Davila, who arrived at dawn from the coastal city of Chone, some 300 kilometers (about 185 miles) away. “I want to reach 100.”

After the open-air mass, a private lunch was planned with a group of Jesuits.

A highlight was to be a reunion with the Rev. Francisco Cortes, a priest affectionately known as “Padre Paquito,” to whom the Argentina-born pope, then the Rev. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, entrusted his seminarians on study trips to Ecuador years ago.

AP Photo/Fernando VergaraA woman holds up an Ecuadorian national flag in a crowd of thousands waiting in the Samanes Park for the start of an outdoor Mass celebrated by Pope Francis, in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Monday, July 6, 2015.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Cortes couldn’t fathom that Bergoglio remembered him, much less made a point of coming to have lunch.

“I don’t know what to ask him,” the soon-to-be 91-year-old Cortes said. “He said he wanted to see me and I’m amazed that he’s coming. For the first time, I have known a pope.

AP Photo/Fernando VergaraA woman waves a flag with the image of Pope Francis before the start of a Mass at the Samanes Park in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Monday, July 6, 2015.

The “pope of the poor” returned to Spanish-speaking South America for the first time as pontiff Sunday, stressing the importance of protecting the needy and the environment from exploitation and – in a nation whose president was booed as his vehicle followed the papal motorcade Sunday – to foster dialogue among all sectors of society. It’s a message he’s expected to repeat during his next stops in Bolivia and Paraguay, South America’s two poorest countries.

Francis’ only other trip back to Latin America since being elected pope was in 2013, when he visited Brazil, where Portuguese is the main language.

Francis’ environmental message – from a pope who last month issued a treatise staking the Earth’s preservation as a core mission for humanity – is particularly relevant for Ecuador, a Pacific nation that is home to one of the world’s most species-diverse ecosystems but is also an OPEC country heavily dependent on oil. High crude prices allowed Correa to lift 1.3 million people out of poverty in his eight years in office.

But now that prices have fallen, the generous social safety net Correa has woven is threatened. He’s had to cut government spending and been buffeted for nearly a month by the most serious anti-government street protests of his tenure.

Along Francis’ motorcade route, the crowds alternated chants of adulation for the pontiff with jeers of “Correa out!” when the president’s entourage followed.

Correa also has angered environmentalists and the nation’s main indigenous group, CONAIE, by moving forward with oil drilling and mining projects in pristine Amazon forests.

AP Photo/Fernando VergaraFaithful wait for the arrival of Pope Francis to celebrate a Mass at the Samanes Park in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Monday, July 6, 2015.

JUAN CEVALLOS/AFP/Getty ImagesNuns chat together at a park waiting for the visit of Pope Francis in Guayaquil late on July 5, 2015.

JUAN CEVALLOS/AFP/Getty ImagesA devotee waits alone around empty chairs at a park waiting for the visit of Pope Francis in Guayaquil late on July 5, 2015.

OSSERVATORE ROMANO/AFP/Getty ImagesThis handout photo taken on July 5, 2015 and released by the Vatican press office, Osservatore Romano shows Pope Francis welcomed by Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa upon his arrival in Quito.

RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP/Getty ImagesPope Francis waves at the crowd as he arrives at the Mariscal Sucre international airport in Quito on July 5, 2015. Pope Francis arrived in Quito Sunday to begin his first South American trip in two years, for an eight-day tour of Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay highlighting the plight of the poor on his home continent.

DES MOINES, Iowa — Roman Catholic leaders in the early voting state of Iowa have called on candidates for president to follow the teachings of Pope Francis and focus as much on the environment and income inequality in 2016 as they have in past elections on opposing gay marriage and abortion.

Thursday’s event marked the first time a U.S. Catholic bishop has publicly asked those seeking the White House to heed the admonitions of Francis’ June encyclical, said Bishop Richard Pates of Des Moines. Bishops elsewhere in the U.S. plan similar pressure.

In that major teaching document, the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics called for a “bold sweeping revolution” to correct what he sees as a “structurally perverse” economic system that allows the rich to exploit the poor and has turned the Earth into an “immense pile of filth.”

“The goal of the pope is to raise the questions with all the candidates,” Pates said. “It’s a moral issue, our relationship with creation, our relationship with each other.”

The push from Pates and other bishops in Iowa threatens to disrupt the historically reliable alliance of evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholic voters, putting pressure on Republicans who have leaned on their religious faith to guide them on social issues.

It will also focus attention on how the six Roman Catholic seeking the 2016 Republican presidential nomination — former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former New York Gov. George Pataki, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum — will wrestle with a pope’s teachings on economics and climate change that clash with traditional Republican ideology.

While Francis has condemned abortion and upheld marriage as the union of a man and a woman, he has not done so with anything approaching the frequency of his two predecessors, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Instead, Francis has urged church leaders to talk less about such social issues and more about mercy and compassion, so that wayward Catholics would feel welcome to return to the church.

“Pope Francis hasn’t changed church teaching, but he has given greater salience to social welfare and environmental issues, which has put Catholic Republicans in an awkward position,” said John Green, director of the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.

Francis is expected to highlight the issues in September when he makes his first visit to the U.S., where he will address a joint session of Congress and the U.N. General Assembly.

Bishops beyond politically important Iowa plan to do so as well. Church leaders in Ohio and Virginia, plan events related to the encyclical in August, according to the Catholic Climate Covenant, which works with American bishops on the environment.

In Florida, a crucial state whose large population swings between voting Republican and Democrat, Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski is planning sermons and events to amplify the pope’s call for action to curb global warming. Wenski is the U.S. bishops’ point person on the environment.

So far, most Republican candidates have taken the approach that Francis crossed beyond spiritual matters and into public policy.

Bush called Francis “an incredible leader” during a visit to Iowa last month. But he added, “I don’t go to Mass for economic policy or for things in politics.”

Campaigning in Iowa on Thursday, Jindal said Francis’ call to regulate the economy to assist the poor overlooks the principle that a less constrained economy can benefit the poor.

There’s an old saying about the way the Vicar of Christ is chosen by the Roman Catholic church: “Thin pope, fat pope.” The adjectives are not literal, although sometimes the church has appeared to act as though they were. The idea is that the big job alternates between subtle, power-brokering intellectuals and sweet-natured, avuncular populists. You choose a “thin” pope to get things done and establish theological rigour. Then an exemplary “fat” pope, to consolidate the love of the faithful.

Pope Francis, with his instinct for humble gestures and his attractive self-denial, is the fattest (phattest?) of fat popes. As a bishop he was famous for riding the city bus to work in Buenos Aires. He still wears the pectoral cross he came into the papacy with, and refuses to wear fancy vestments, or even to live in the really nice four-star papal apartments. He is hardly ever seen wearing the papal mitre (that’s the tall headgear everybody thinks of as a “pope hat”) and has mused about discarding it altogether.

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On June 18, though, he almost seemed to set a new standard for regular-guy-ness when his official Twitter account let loose with a machine-gun rattle of short quotations from his new papal encyclical about the environment, Laudato Si’. Note that the letter has a vulgar-language title — an Umbrian lyric taken from the Pope’s namesake, Francis of Assisi — which is how Popes signal that they want to roll up their sleeves and get all worldly.

I say “quotations” out of instinctive respect, but one is tempted to say “quips.” Whoever is in charge of @Pontifex started dishing tweets like some layabout ex-journalist tweaking on Red Bull. And come to think of it, that is probably exactly the sort of person who was handling the task. “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” the Holy Father’s social-media personification rapped. “We have to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

The present world system is certainly unsustainable from a number of points of view. #LaudatoSi

As an atheist, I’m afraid my instinctive reaction to the pope’s zingers is that an awful lot of the places on Earth where people live literally on piles of filth happen, by some tragic coincidence, to be predominantly Catholic. Still, I wanted to give the full encyclical a chance. Laudato Si’, when not chopped up into theology McNuggets, creates a very different impression, alternating between personal observations and dreary, committee-written boilerplate.

Non-Catholics responded positively to the Pope’s tweetstorm because he seemed to be taking a firm position on climate change, and the letter certainly does that. But the head of the Catholic religion turns out to be no more capable of expressing himself compactly on one important issue than is the typical adherent of the Environmentalist religion.

The climate is a “common good,” says the Pope, and there is “a very solid scientific consensus” that it is changing in “disturbing” ways. Hooray for Science Pope! But before you know it he is weighing in on drinking water. “…in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market.” It turns out this is bad, even though almost any economist alive would instantly apply a red pencil and several question marks to that “despite.”

Before long Francis is going off on “Decline in the Quality of Human Life and the Breakdown of Society.” Hilariously, there’s a warning about new digital media, presumably in forms like … er, Twitter? They “[give] rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature,” quoth @Pontifex.

Pope FrancisAFP Photo / Alberto Pizzoli

One begins to suspect that this ordinary-Joe pope may lack even the ordinary Joe’s normal quantum of irony. The confirmation comes in the section of the encyclical on “Global Inequality,” and, yes, we are wandering pretty far now from atmosphere physics. After a brief discussion of the global poor, the Holy Father gets defensive. “Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different,” he says, “some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate.”

I hear you saying “Not a bad idea, Pope!” Well, surprise: he is not having it. “To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues.” It turns out you are actually doing harm if you think handing out condoms and IUDs can help poor countries become more self-sufficient and liberate their women.

There is a lot more of this, and I must confess that by the time I got some way into the chapter on “The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis,” the encyclical was no longer reminding me of Russell Brand: it was reminding me of the Unabomber Manifesto. That is, of course, a little unfair. Ted Kaczynski is responsible for nowhere near as much injury to human welfare as the Catholic Church inflicts every 15 minutes, and, besides, he’s a better writer. Still, you tell me with a straight face that some of this stuff doesn’t remind you of good old Ted. Here’s a big hunk:

Unabomber or Unapapa?

“The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same.”

Pure Kaczynski, yeah? The next sentence could easily be “So that’s why I moved to a cabin in the woods and started mailing bombs to scientists.” Let me give you another: Unabomber or Unapapa?

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behaviour that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being.”

That one’s Ted — or have I switched them? No, despite the stylistic similarities, the parallel quotes, which could be multiplied greatly, does reveal a weakness in my insolent comparison. The Pope is an optimist, and thinks technology can be tamed if human hearts turn to Christ in time. Kaczynski thinks the problems involved in technological progress are inherent. He specifically argues that they cannot be solved by religion, real or contrived.

Although Science Pope does not have the equivalent of a degree in science — many of his non-Catholic supporters seem to have thought otherwise — he did work as a chem-lab technician as a young man. In that capacity he could easily have been the target of an Argentine version of the Unabomber. Fortunately, he escaped to glory.

VATICAN CITY — At at a Thursday meeting with Pope Francis, Prime Minister Stephen Harper only indirectly raised the issue of an apology from the Roman Catholic Church in the residential schools scandal – raising the ire of those who had hoped for a more personal appeal.

Harper did draw the pontiff’s attention to a letter to the Vatican from Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt. It takes no stand on what the Pope should do, but does note that Harper had already issued an apology in 2008 to former residential school students – to the day seven years ago, in fact – and that the TRC released an executive summary of its final report last week, with 94 recommendations.

“Some recommendations relate to the Churches which operated residential schools in Canada,” writes Valcourt in the letter. “I wish to bring these recommendations to the attention of the Holy See.”
But in a news release issued after Harper had his private papal audience, the Vatican did not mention the Valcourt letter or the possibility of an apology.

In a prepared statement, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde said it is “deeply disappointing” that Harper did not ask the Pope to apologize. “Today would have been a powerful and appropriate day to issue that invitation and it would help survivors in their healing journey.”

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian WyldLaureen Harper and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican in Vatican City, Italy, Thursday, June 11, 2015.

About 75,000 of the 150,000 aboriginal children who endured abuse at residential schools remain alive and are seeking ways to heal and reconcile with other Canadians. Bellegarde said some former residential school students will now conclude Harper doesn’t care about them.

In its report last week, the TRC recommended the Pope travel to Canada within the next year and issue an apology for the church’s role in the “spiritual, emotional, physical and sexual abuse” of aboriginal students in Catholic-run schools.
The commission said the apology could be similar to the one issued by then-Pope Benedict in 2010 to Irish victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy in that country.

The ostensible reason for Harper’s meeting with the Pope on Thursday was to invite him to Canada for the 150th anniversary of Confederation, in 2017. There was no indication from the Vatican whether the Pope would take the prime minister up on his offer.

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That stands in contrast to the 50 minutes Pope Francis granted a day earlier to Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, a nation of about 770,000 Catholics (versus Canada’s 12.7 million).

The prime minister and his wife, Laureen, were greeted by the Gentlemen of His Holiness who ushered them inside a part of the Vatican that is near the Sistine Chapel.

The prime minister’s entourage included Defence Minister Jason Kenney, Minister of National Defence Julian Fantino and three other Conservative MPs.

Canada gave the pontiff a hand-carved maple leaf of rare stone taken from the quarry where the Parliament Hill stones originate. The Pope gave the Canadians medallions of his pontificate.

AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia Pope Francis shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the occasion of a private audience at the Vatican, Wednesday, June 10, 2015.

As Harper has at every stop on his six-day rush through Ukraine, Germany, Poland and Italy, he raised the issue with Pope Francis of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

“Prime Minister Harper addressed the situation in Ukraine and his deep concern with Vladimir Putin’s aggression, occupation and violence in Ukraine (and) the plight of religious minorities at the hands of (ISIL) barbarism,” the prime minister’s office reported of his remarks to the Pope.

Adopting a softer line, the Vatican said in a statement there had been “reference to Europe and the Middle East and the prospect for peace in that region, as well as the fight against terrorism and environmental issues.”

During Harper’s six days in Europe, which ended with a meet-and-greet with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, he took only six questions from Canadian journalists travelling with him.

Most of the prime minister’s activities involved staged photo opportunities. Many of the images might be used during the coming election campaign.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian WyldCanadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is escorted to a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican in Vatican City, Italy, Thursday, June 11, 2015.

The visits to Ukraine and Poland were as much about assuring the more than two million Canadian voters of Ukrainian and Polish descent that the government was deeply concerned about the danger posed to their ancestral countries by Putin’s bellicose behaviour and, in concert with its allies, was taking action to counter that.

Ukraine also figured in the prime minister’s discussions with Renzi. The Harper government has been worried that Italy, among others, may backslide on commitments to maintain Western sanctions against Russia.

Doubts about Italy’s commitment were raised after Renzi had what was by all accounts a pleasant, Ukraine-free conversation Wednesday with Putin, who was visiting Italy.

Harper, as he has done frequently in the past, used the Canadian military as a prop as he hopscotched from Kyiv to the Bavarian Alps, Warsaw, the Baltic Sea and Rome. In this regard, the golden moment of the trip was on the HMCS Fredericton as it sailed in the Baltic Sea near the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. As the cameras rolled, the prime minister peered through binoculars and could see Russian warships shadowing the Fredericton.

National Post, with files from Mark Kennedy, Ottawa Citizen

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian WyldPope Francis greets Prime Minister Stephen Harper at his desk in Vatican City.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/harper-raises-residential-school-findings-with-pope-pmo-says-but-no-talk-of-an-apology/feed1]]>stdStephen Harper Pope FrancisTHE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian WyldAP Photo/Gregorio Borgia THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian WyldTHE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian WyldFive of the best recommendations from the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, and five that will be problematichttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/five-of-the-best-and-perhaps-worst
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/five-of-the-best-and-perhaps-worst#commentsThu, 04 Jun 2015 03:47:37 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=788047

The Truth & Reconciliation Commission formally wrapped up its six-year task Wednesday with a ceremony at Rideau Hall, a day after releasing a report with 94 recommendations — some suggesting necessary and practical steps, others possibly not so much. The National Post‘s Jen Gerson offers her thoughts on five of each:

FIVE EASY WINS

1. Restoring traditional names

Residential schools took away their charges’ clothes, separated them from their siblings, and restricted the use of their own language. They also took away their traditional names, oftentimes replacing them with European ones. The report called on governments to waive administrative fees for five years so survivors and their descendants can restore their names on birth certificates, passports, drivers’ licences, health cards, status cards and social insurance numbers.

2. Annual accountability

The recommendations included creating annual reports to examine the state of several First Nations issues, including children in care, health care and education. For example, each province is responsible for its own child welfare system, but certain trends across the country have long been apparent: First Nations children are overrepresented among those who have been seized by the government. Annual reports that objectively measure disparities can help find — and fix — funding and regulatory issues.

3. A monument to our mistake

The report calls on provincial and federal governments to install highly visible monuments in Ottawa and each provincial capital. The logistics of this are, inevitably, going to be fraught. However, in the grander scheme of things, at least one monument seems appropriate. In the meantime, there’s still space between the Supreme Court of Canada and the National Library in Ottawa. Catch it before it’s used to commemorate the victims of a political ideology that has never been enacted in this country.

4. Aboriginal education — for non-aboriginals

The report suggests training for various professionals — medical and nursing students, lawyers, public servants, journalists — in aboriginal culture, the history of residential schooling, and other profession-specific items. The government should certainly not compel this, of course, but better education on these issues is a path toward reconciliation.

5. A new curriculum

The report wants to see Canada’s history, the history of aboriginal peoples here, and the residential school system and its legacy becoming part of the kindergarten to Grade 12 curriculum.

FIVE THAT NEED WORK

1. Spanking-law repeal

The report wants Section 43 of the criminal code — the spanking law — repealed, citing the history of physical discipline and abuse that took place at residential schools. But Section 43, which was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004, noted that only minor and trifling corrective force can legally be used against a child by a guardian or a teacher. The extensive abuse documented in the TRC’s report would not have been allowed under this law.

2. More CBC funding

“We call upon the federal government to restore and increase funding to the CBC/Radio-Canada, to enable Canada’s national public broadcaster to support reconciliation.” Huh? Tying funding to improved aboriginal-language programming in remote regions, or for professional development for aboriginal people may make sense. But this report is also calling on the federal government to restore funding to the CBC so the broadcaster can support the work of the commission itself, turning it into an arm of its own evangelization.

3. Papal apology

“We call upon the Pope to issue an apology to Survivors … to be delivered by the Pope in Canada.” One can’t fault the commission for lack of ambition. Pope Francis, who has already developed a reputation for being of the people, may very well just do it. Maybe not, however. The Roman Catholic Church enjoys the luxury of indifference to worldly, political pressures.

4. Prison reform

The TRC called on all governments to work to reduce the enormous over-representation of aboriginal people in prison within 10 years — seemingly without regard for the types of offences committed, or the impact that would have on First Nations’ communities themselves.

5. Healing lodges

The report calls on Ottawa “to eliminate barriers to the creation of additional Aboriginal healing lodges within the federal correctional system.” There are eight such lodges operating across Canada; they are minimum-security facilities intended to help low-risk offenders serve their time in a way that connects them with culturally and spiritually appropriate facilities. Their implementation has been fraught: First Nations’ communities have been unwilling to accept the lodges, they have been plagued by claims of underfunding, and the recidivism rate is high — 19 per cent, compared with 13 per cent for standard minimum-security facilities.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/five-of-the-best-and-perhaps-worst/feed0stdIn_The_News_Feb_10_20150210‘I felt a hypocrite': Author Michael Coren on why he left the Catholic Church for Anglicanismhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/religion/i-felt-a-hypocrite-author-michael-coren-on-why-he-left-the-catholic-church-for-anglicanism
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/religion/i-felt-a-hypocrite-author-michael-coren-on-why-he-left-the-catholic-church-for-anglicanism#commentsFri, 01 May 2015 23:54:41 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=759828

Until his recent conversion to Anglicanism, the broadcaster and author Michael Coren was one of Canada’s best known Catholics. He has a Catholic wife and four Catholic children and is the author of books that include “Why Catholics Are Right.” So when he was formally welcomed into an Anglican congregation in Toronto the other day, after worshipping with them privately for a year, the news caused a stir in the Catholic world. False rumours were circulated about his motives. Old scandals from a career in punditry were dredged up. The uproar cost him several speeches to conservative American Catholic groups, and his regular column in the Catholic Register was pulled. As he tells the National Post‘s Joseph Brean, he was driven to Protestantism by a growing sense of hypocrisy.

Q: Some people see you as a Catholic champion against an amoral, secular world. How have they reacted?

A: It’s brought out the worst in the Catholic right. If you look at some of the comments, there’s a little tinge of anti-Semitism there (Coren’s father was Jewish), a lot of very sectarian hatred. The Catholic right is very frightened and very aggressive right now, because they have a pope who they no longer think is one of theirs, and so they’re feeling very defensive.

Peter J. Thompson/National PostMichael Coren: “It's not about superiority or inferiority. I needed to find a place for me where I could worship God.”

Q: Even as Pope Francis is welcomed with unprecedented vigour by the popular culture?

A: That’s one of the main reasons they can’t stand it. They don’t want to be accepted.

Q: You say Anglicanism is similar to Catholicism, with many shared beliefs, but the split between the Vatican and the Church of England is longstanding, deep and wide. How did you come to cross it?

A: Yes, of course, otherwise, logically, why would I have bothered? … My father was Jewish, I was raised in a very secular home, sort of semi-culturally Jewish, but no religion. I became a Christian in 1984 and I’ve never wavered. I was received into the Catholic Church in 1985 when I was 26. I’d been interested in Christianity since I was a teenager, actually, and I think I just kept on crawling further and further. It was sort of two feet forward and one foot back the whole time. There was a certain inevitability about it. There was no bunker experience, there were no bullets flying over my head. I think I’d achieved quite a bit early. I’d always wanted to be in literary London, and have books published, and I had all that by about age 24. They were very bad books, but they were published. I was in literary London and there was a certain emptiness.

Q: Was that discovery of faith an intellectual experience? Had you read the grand old Christian apologists like G.K. Chesterton (who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism) and C.S. Lewis (Anglican)?

A: I had. Actually, I sometimes think the seed was planted very young, because I remember when I was about six years old, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (by C.S. Lewis) was read to us, and I had no knowledge at all of the Christian metaphors, or more than that really, the Christian substance. It wasn’t taught in that way, but I’m sure something was set at that point.

Q: You left the Catholic Church for three years in the 1990s, worshiping in various evangelical and Anglican churches. Why did you leave?

A: Not really for particularly good reasons. I had written a piece about (the late) Cardinal (Aloysius) Ambrozic for Toronto Life, and that’s a very long story, and I still don’t really think I did anything wrong, but it was a very difficult time. I was being sort of personally attacked by the Cardinal and his people. I quoted him saying things that were not very Christ-like, I suppose. He had called someone a name. He was a very harsh man. … I just thought I needed a closer relationship with Christ at that time. I just wanted something simpler, a relationship rather than a religion.

Q: What brought you back?

A: It was really the pull of the Eucharist. It really was that. That is a centrepiece of worship for me.

Q: It is not exclusive to the Catholic Church. The same sacrament is given elsewhere.

A: That’s why I’m now in the Anglican Church.

Q: You say you could no longer worship with integrity as a Catholic. Why not?

A: I could not remain in a church that effectively excluded gay people. That’s only one of the reasons, but for someone who had taken the Catholic position on same-sex marriage for so long, I’d never been comfortable with that even though I suppose I was regarded as being a stalwart in that position. But I’d moved on, and I felt a hypocrite. I felt a hypocrite being part of a church that described homosexual relations as being disordered and sinful. I just couldn’t be part of it anymore. I could not do that. I couldn’t look people in the eye and make the argument that is still so central to the Catholic Church, that same-sex attraction is acceptable but to act on it is sinful. I felt that the circle of love had to be broadened, not reduced.

Q: How did you receive Pope Francis’s famous “Who am I to judge?” comment on homosexuality?

A: It’s not what it says. He was referring to one gay priest who abandoned the gay lifestyle to be celibate. Francis has also gone to the Philippines and referred to “gender theory,” which is Catholic code really for same-sex issues, and compared it to the Hitler Youth. The Catholic Church is not going to change its teaching. Believe me, the Catholic Church cannot.

Q: So you left. You were not lured away.

A: It’s not about superiority or inferiority. I needed to find a place for me where I could worship God, where I could be given the Eucharist, but I didn’t have to buy into some of the social and moral teaching that I had not been able to embrace for more than a year.

Q: Catholics are called to be faithful and obedient, to defer to authority that goes back through the popes to Peter. Were you a good Catholic?

A: I don’t think I’m a very good Christian. I try my best. It’s very hard. If you mean was I completely obedient, I certainly tried to be.

ROME — Pope Francis has been told by Vatican doctors to lay off the pasta, after gaining weight since being elected as head of the Roman Catholic Church two years ago.

The 78-year-old Argentine pontiff has appeared noticeably more upholstered during public appearances over the past few months, with doctors ascribing the weight gain to too much spaghetti and ravioli and not enough exercise.

Vatican doctors told Ansa, Italy’s national news agency, that the Pope needed to adopt a more “disciplined” regimen in order to try to combat the stress and strain he faced as the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.

They have advised him to eat pasta no more than two times a week.

The Pope, who has only one fully functioning lung, takes no holidays, deals with an enormous amount of correspondence and has embarked on reform of the Vatican’s murky financial institutions. He has set a blistering pace with his travel agenda since becoming Pope in 2013. In addition to visiting Lampedusa, the island where tens of thousands of asylum seekers have arrived, he has also visited the mafia heartland of Calabria and, last month, the port city of Naples.

His international trips have taken him to Brazil, Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, Albania and Turkey, and he is scheduled to visit the US at the end of this year.

Medics want to take no chances with his state of health, particularly after he said recently that because of his advanced age he had an intuition that his papacy would be a short one. In a wide-ranging interview to mark his two years as Pope, he also revealed that the thing he most misses is the freedom to nip out for a pizza – another Italian staple that will ring alarm bells with doctors.

The Vatican and Italy yesterday (Wednesday) signed an agreement to share financial and tax information. The Holy See pledged full cooperation and transparency in a deal that came after months of talks. It will cover information from 2009 onwards.

For St. Patrick’s Day, I opted not for leprechaun paraphernalia or drinking to excess, but theology. I presume it forgivable for a priest to treat a saint’s day as something at least in part religious. I was in Toronto for a public conversation with George Weigel, one of the English language’s leading Catholic intellectuals and the biographer of St. John Paul II. Our conversation, on the day dedicated to the great missionary bishop in Ireland, reflected the changing face of Christian public witness in the 21st century.

First, the day. St. Patrick’s Day is almost the perfect metaphor for a once-Christian culture that has abandoned Christianity for practical purposes and no longer aspires to much in the way of culture either. Reduced to commercial excess in the service of thin sentimentality and even thinner (faux) Irish patriotism, St. Patrick’s Day, as we now observe it, has little to do with the saint at all, let alone any sense that his life’s work — the conversion of pagans to Christianity — might be worth celebrating, much less emulating. It’s not for lack of pagans.

The Irish actually make rather less of St. Patrick’s Day than their vast diaspora. Likely because celebrating being Irish is rather less urgent for the people who actually reside there, it is also because Irish Catholicism — one of the great culture-shaping forces of the Anglosphere from New York to Melbourne to the missions in Africa — is in rather rough shape. The ravages of clerical sexual abuse are at fault, but there is also the reality that Irish Catholicism, a missionary powerhouse for centuries, has lost its confidence that it has something precious to offer.

That’s reflected in the changing face of Christian witness here. The current cardinal in Toronto — I was with him for the St. Patrick’s Mass at his cathedral — and New York and Boston are Irish, as their predecessors have largely been, but the vital energy in their flocks is not. The past was Irish. The future will be Indian, or Filipino, or Vietnamese. The erosion of the Irish Catholic juggernaut is just one part of a world in which faith cannot be passed on genetically, or as an ethnic identity.

Second, the place. My conversation with Mr. Weigel was held at Morrow Park, the campus now of Tyndale University College & Seminary, a post-secondary institution of about 1,600 students in the Protestant evangelical tradition. It used to be the mother house of the Sisters of St. Joseph. (Incidentally, March 19 is St. Joseph’s feast day and its near-total lack of observance today, despite him being the patron saint of Canada, is another indication of receding Christian public presence.)

The Sisters were an enormous force in the history of Toronto, founders of St. Michael’s Hospital and leaders in education and social service. Nuns were often the face of Christian leadership in first half of the 20th century. No longer, and with dwindling numbers, the sale of their mother house to Tyndale is symbolic. Protestant evangelicals are an increasing part of Christian witness all over the world. Indeed, in Buenos Aires, before his election as pope, Francis was a pioneer in collaboration between Catholics and evangelicals for common Christian witness.

Generations ago, St. Patrick’s Day in Toronto would have been a day for a Catholic and Irish minority to make itself heard

Third, the host. Our discussion was hosted by Convivium, a magazine I edit on faith in our common life. That project, which is three years old, is a collaboration between a Catholic publisher and editor, on one hand, and Cardus, Canada’s leading Christian think tank, which, despite its Latin-derived name, developed from the Dutch Reformed tradition. When the Sisters of St. Joseph built Morrow Park, a joint venture between Catholics and Calvinists was simply unimaginable. In the United States, Mr. Weigel has been a leading figure in a project called Evangelicals and Catholic Together, which explores theological common ground and shared public witness.

Generations ago, St. Patrick’s Day in Toronto would have been a day for a Catholic and Irish minority to make itself heard in a city whose religious landscape was dominated by the archbishop primate of what was then called the “Church of England in the Dominion of Canada.” That world is long gone, giving way to a new realty, where it’s pointless to emphasize Irish Catholicism against an Anglican establishment, but rather urgent for Christian voices across the ecclesial divides, numerically fewer but more theologically engaged, to contend together against a secular culture. That’s the new face of Christian witness, and to which our convivial conversation on St. Patrick’s raised a glass, albeit not a green beer.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/father-raymond-j-de-souza-a-little-theology-on-st-patricks-day/feed0stdSt. Patrick’s Day is the perfect metaphor for a once-Christian culture that has abandoned Christianity and no longer aspires to much in the way of culture either.‘I have the sensation that my pontificate will be brief: Four or five years': Is Pope now a short-term job?http://news.nationalpost.com/news/religion/i-have-the-sensation-that-my-pontificate-will-be-brief-four-or-five-years-is-pope-now-a-short-term-job
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VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Friday marked the second anniversary of his surprise election by predicting that he won’t be pope for long — and by calling a special Jubilee Year to focus the church on his top priority while he’s still around: mercy.

“I have the sensation that my pontificate will be brief: Four or five years,” Francis said in an interview with the Mexican broadcaster Televisa. “I don’t know. Or two or three. Well, two have already passed!”

Francis has previously said he thought he’d be pope for two to three years and that the precedent set by Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation in 2013 shouldn’t be considered exceptional.

Francis also said he didn’t dislike being pope but that what he really missed was his freedom.

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“The only thing I’d like to do is to be able to go out one day without anyone recognizing me and go get a pizza,” he said, laughing.

At Mass later Friday, Francis also announced a special Jubilee Year starting Dec. 8 to focus the church on forgiveness and mercy. It’s only the 27th time in the history of the Catholic Church that there has been a Holy Year. The last one was called by St. John Paul II in 2000 to mark the start of the third millennium.

Holy Years allow the faithful to receive special indulgences, ways to repair the damage of sin beyond the absolution granted by going to confession. The year begins with the symbolic opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica.

In his homily announcing the Jubilee, Francis said the church must always keep its doors open so no one is excluded from God’s mercy.

“The bigger the sin, the greater must be the love that the church shows to those who convert,” he said.

Pope Francis, who marks the second anniversary of his election tomorrow, continues to fascinate the world and remains enormously popular. Much of the commentary on the anniversary seeks to explain just that: Why does he remain so popular? I would suggest three reasons — the first which I hope is true, the second which I worry is true, and the third, which I believe is true.

In 2005, Pope Benedict XVI taught in his first encyclical that the Church had three fundamental duties: the preaching of the gospel, the worship of God, and the service of charity. For most of the past 50 years, the Church’s energies have been occupied with confusions and controversies on the first two of those three. Consequently, the service of charity has been given relatively less attention. Francis has a transparent heart for the poor and afflicted, lifting up the work the Church has usually devoted most of her energies toward: the care of the poor and afflicted, the sick and the vulnerable, the weak and neglected.

Yet as the culture has changed, despite the fact the Church spends far more time on care for the poor than she does on contested moral questions, the public profile of the Church has focused on the latter rather than the former. My hope is that people respond so favourably to Francis precisely because they recognize in him the Christian mandate to see, as Mother Teresa put it, the “face of Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor.”

However much I would like that to be the case, it is undoubtedly true that there are many who are excited about Francis who demonstrate no particular interest in the poor, hence my worry. For many, Francis is popular because they see him as (finally) raising the white flag of surrender to the dominant social phenomenon of our time, the sexual revolution. Francis has indicated that before the Church has anything to say about sexual morality, she has a lot to say about the merciful love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. The moral life follows as a consequence — an important consequence, but nonetheless a consequence. Francis’ change in emphasis has been regarded by many as a change in doctrine, which he has said explicitly that he cannot and will not do.

Pope Francis warns against giving moral questions too much emphasis, but many are enthused by him precisely because they give all their attention to moral questions, and think Francis will take the Catholic Church in the direction of liberal Protestantism on those issues. It is this mistaken understanding of Francis’ pontificate that both creates excitement and dismay, high expectations and great apprehensions.

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Then there is what I think is the truth about the great resonance of Pope Francis in contemporary culture. As mighty a cultural juggernaut as secularism is, it cannot snuff out the desire of the human heart for the transcendent. The usual formulation for this is a desire to be spiritual, but not religious. Pope Francis corresponds very well to that aspiration, for he is often understood not so much as a figure of the Church, but in juxtaposition to it. It’s an odd reception for a man who describes himself as a “loyal son of the Church,” but nevertheless it is real. His adoption of a simpler papal style is often interpreted as distancing himself from the office he holds. His language is widely accessible precisely because he speaks most often, including in his frequent interviews, as a fellow believer, not an authoritative teacher. Indeed, the defining phrase of his pontificate — Who am I to judge?­­ — expresses just that.

The task of leadership, pastoral leadership included, depends upon both personal charisma and the charism of office. A pope can rely more on one than the other, but needs both. Francis, more than his immediate predecessors, relies on his person, content to offer himself — in interviews, in private phone calls and meetings, in direct actions independent of his collaborators — more than he stresses the entire weight of his office as universal pastor of the Church. That offers both opportunities and involves risks, but it does correspond to how our culture likes its leaders, as companions on the way rather than guides indicating the path to be followed.

Wherever Francis goes, whatever Francis does, it makes news. And because Francis does not desire to be the news himself, it means the Church is news and the gospel of Jesus Christ is news. Whether that is the news the world desires remains to be seen, but it is undoubtedly paying attention.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/father-raymond-j-de-souza-on-pope-francis-the-churchs-loyal-son/feed0stdVatican_PopefbPope grants prized plot to homeless man who was well known in St. Peter’s Squarehttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/pope-grants-prized-plot-to-homeless-man-who-was-well-known-in-st-peters-square
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Pope Francis has taken his embrace of homeless people a step further by allowing a frequent St. Peter’s Square beggar to be buried inside the Vatican for the first time in the history of the Holy See.

Willy Herteleer, who is thought to have been Belgian, had been well known for years around St Peter’s Square, sleeping rough and begging from passers-by.

The Flemish-speaker died last month at about the age of 80 and the Pope, who has made concern for the poor and disenfranchised a keynote of his papacy, consented to him being buried in the Teutonic Cemetery, in the shadow of St Peter’s Basilica.

The cemetery is normally reserved for German-speaking clergy and members of German religious foundations in Rome, and its proximity to St Peter’s means that burial plots are highly prized.

The unusual request came from Amerigo Ciani, a monsignor, who had befriended the homeless man during church services and told the Pope about his death. “Holy Father, we don’t know where to bury him,” Msgr Ciani said.

“Give him a dignified burial in the Vatican,” the pontiff replied, according to Il Messagero, the Italian newspaper that first reported the story.

Msgr Ciani said: “He was a clean and honest man. He lived on the margins, unnoticed by our egotistical society.”
A Vatican insider told The Daily Telegraph: “It is without doubt the first time that a homeless person has been buried within the walls of the Vatican.

“This is the only cemetery within the Vatican, excluding the tombs beneath St Peter’s. Cardinals and bishops are buried in their titular churches or at the cemetery of Verano [on the outskirts of Rome].”

Mr Herteleer was found close to unconsciousness one night in January, as he slept out in the cold. He was taken by ambulance to Santo Spirito in Sassia Hospital, just outside the Vatican City State, but died shortly afterwards.

He now rests in peace among diplomats, artists and benefactors of the Roman Catholic Church in the walled Teutonic Cemetery, which has a long history. “In ancient Roman times Nero’s circus was found here and it was the site where many Christians were martyred,” according to the Vatican website.

It was associated with German-speaking pilgrims as early as the 8th century, when the land was given by Pope Leo IV to Charlemagne, and is the final resting place not just of Germans but also Austrians, Swiss and Dutch.

Among the people buried there are missionaries, painters and a former prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives.

SAN FRANCISCO — Under pressure from his Catholic schools community, the archbishop of the San Francisco archdiocese said Tuesday that he is peeling back strict guidelines he proposed for teachers that would require them to reject homosexuality, use of contraception and other “evil” behavior.

Most significantly, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said he is dropping an effort to designate high school teachers as “ministers,” which under a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling would have eliminated them from government-mandated employee protections by placing them solely under church control.

In an hour-long meeting with The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board, Cordileone said he is forming a committee of theology teachers from the San Francisco Archdiocese’s four high schools to go over his proposed teacher guidelines. The committee, he said, will “recommend to me an expanded draft” and “adjust the language to make the statements more readily understandable to a wider leadership.”

“I was surprised at the degree of consternation over this,” Cordileone said. What he is drafting, he said, is merely a reiteration of existing Catholic morality doctrines concerning behavior.

I was surprised at the degree of consternation over this

The modifications Cordileone drew up this month for the Faculty Handbook for his archdiocese’s 350 or so teachers ignited a firestorm of opposition when teachers, parents and students interpreted them to mean staff could be fired for being in same-sex marriages, using contraception, approving of abortion or engaging in other actions the handbook labeled as “evil.”

Of particular concern to some faculty was the prospect of punishment for behavior done behind closed doors. One statement from the archdiocese said high school administrators, faculty and staff who are Catholics “are called to conform their hearts, minds and consciences, as well as their public and private behavior, ever more closely to the truths taught by the Catholic Church.”

Cordileone said he has no intention of invading private lives. The purpose of his guidelines, he said, is to make sure his teachers’ behavior, and the examples they set in public, don’t contradict bedrock Catholic principles — which condemn same-sex marriage, abortion and birth control, among other things.

The new language is meant only to “clarify,” he said, and not to trigger teacher firings or ignite “a witch hunt.”

“My primary concern is for the good of our students,” he told the board. “We want our students to flourish.”

Publicist Sam Singer, who is representing parents and alumni of San Francisco Catholic schools as they try to counter the proposed dictates, said the archbishop’s statements were welcome news.

“The proof is in the pudding, so we’ll have to take a look at what the archbishop comes back with,” Singer said. “But this is certainly a step in the right direction, and is welcomed by many of the parents, teachers and alumni. But there is still much work to be done.”

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis welcomed 20 new cardinals Saturday into the elite club of churchmen who will elect his successor and immediately delivered a tough-love message to them, telling them to put aside their pride, jealousy and self-interests and instead exercise perfect charity.

Francis issued the marching orders during the ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica to elevate the new “princes of the church” into the College of Cardinals and give them their new red hats.

Retired Pope Benedict XVI was on hand for the ceremony, sitting off to the side in the front row of the basilica, in a unique blending of popes past, present and future. Francis embraced him at the start and end of the service and a cluster of cardinals lined up to greet him before processing out.

Many of the new cardinals hail from far-flung, often overlooked dioceses where Catholics are a distinct minority — a reflection of Francis’ insistence that the church look to the peripheries and reflect them in its governance. Several are pastors who, like Francis, have focused their ministries on the poor and disenfranchised.

In his homily, Francis reminded his newest collaborators that being a cardinal isn’t a prize or fancy entitlement, but rather a way to serve the church better in humility and tenderness.

He warned them that not even churchmen are immune from the temptation to be jealous, angry or proud, or to pursue their own self-interests, even when “cloaked in noble appearances.”

“Even here, charity, and charity alone, frees us,” he said. “Above all it frees us from the mortal danger of pent-up anger, of that smoldering anger which makes us brood over wrongs we have received. No. This is unacceptable in a man of the church.”

In some ways, his tough words were a toned-down version of the blistering critique he delivered right before Christmas to Vatican bureaucrats. Then, he ticked off 15 ailments including “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and the “terrorism of gossip,” that can afflict men of the church even at its highest levels.

This is Francis’ second consistory creating new cardinals and once again he looked to the “peripheries” to give greater geographic representation to the Europe-centric College of Cardinals.

His choices, though, also reflect his vision for what the church should be: One that looks out for the poor and most marginalized, guided by shepherds who have what he has called the “smell” of their sheep.

They include Cardinal Soane Patita Paini Mafi of Tonga, a tiny island state in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the front lines of global warming.

Another is Cardinal Francesco Montenegro of Agrigento, Sicily, whose church — which extends to the island of Lampedusa — has coped with the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants over the years.

And there’s the archbishop of David, Panama, Cardinal Jose Luis Lacunza Maestrojuan, who works with indigenous peoples to protect them from mining interests.

While cardinals are called on to advise the pope, their primary job is to elect a new one. Only those under age 80 can participate in a conclave and with Saturday’s additions, their number stands at 125 — five over the traditional cap, though four of them will turn 80 this year. The college as a whole numbers 227.

In addition to naming 15 voting-age cardinals, Francis also made five elderly churchmen cardinals to honor their service to the church.

One of them, Colombian Cardinal José de Jesús Pimiento Rodriguez, wasn’t able to make the trip to Rome for the ceremony because of his age: He turns 96 next week and will have his red hat delivered to him.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/pope-francis-appoints-20-new-cardinals-telling-them-to-put-aside-their-pride-and-jealousy/feed4stdPope Francis Appoints Twenty New CardinalsVatican may be asked to revoke Papal Bulls that granted explorers right to conquer new world and ‘heathen’ aboriginalshttp://news.nationalpost.com/holy-post/vatican-may-be-asked-to-revoke-papal-bulls-that-granted-explorers-right-to-conquer-new-world-and-heathen-aboriginals
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Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is weighing whether to ask the Vatican to repeal the Papal Bulls of Discovery that granted 15th-century explorers the right to conquer the New World and the “heathen” aboriginals that called it home.

Chair Murray Sinclair says the commission examining the impact of Canada’s Indian residential schools is looking carefully at the 1455 and 1493 Catholic edicts as part of its final report.

Many argue the proclamations legitimized the treatment of aboriginal people as “less than human.” Crown sovereignty in Canada can be traced back to those papal bulls and neither Canada nor the United States has repudiated them, Sinclair said.

“The movement to repudiation is very strong and is moving ahead,” Sinclair said in an interview. “If we as the commission are going to join that movement or endorse it … we have to come to a conclusion that it’s necessary for reconciliation, to establish a proper relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people.”

A growing chorus in Canada is calling on the Vatican to help begin a new relationship with aboriginal people on equal footing.

The discovery bulls, and others in the same vein that followed, gave Catholic explorers “full and free power, authority, and jurisdiction of every kind” and outlined their “duty to lead the peoples dwelling in those islands and countries to embrace the Christian religion.”

If aboriginal people refused, the Vatican granted its envoys the authority to enslave and kill.

If the commission recommends the bulls be rescinded, Sinclair said, it has to weigh the legal implications, which could strike at the core of Crown sovereignty over land.

“What would be the basis for rationalizing Crown sovereignty if the Doctrine of Discovery is no longer available?” Sinclair said. “We have to consider that question and perhaps give some direction about how that relationship can be re-established in a proper way … on a nation-to-nation level.”

The United Nations appointed a special rapporteur in 2009 who found the bulls lie “at the root of the violations of indigenous peoples’ human rights.” The edicts have resulted in the “mass appropriation of the lands, territories, and resources of indigenous peoples,” the UN found. They also form the legal basis of many modern-day land claim disputes, it said.

Keith Matthew, former chief of Simpcw First Nation in British Columbia, has been quietly building support in Canada for their repeal. He recently got the support of the Assembly of First Nations, which passed a resolution at its December meeting endorsing the revocation of the bulls.

“The papal bulls put us in a position no better than animals,” he said. “We know better today. We’re just as civilized and human as anyone else in this world. It’s really about righting a historic wrong.

“I’m no animal. I’m a person, a human being.”

Hayden King, director of the Centre for Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University, said simply calling for the edicts to be repealed isn’t enough for reconciliation.
He said it would be more significant if the government recognized its sovereignty was based on a “fairy tale” that aboriginal people are not human and further recognized aboriginal title to land.

“Unless there was corresponding action, it would seem kind of hollow.”

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Pope Francis says it’s OK to spank your children to discipline them – as long as their dignity is maintained.

Francis made the remarks this week during his weekly general audience, which was devoted to the role of fathers in the family.

Francis outlined the traits of a good father: one who forgives but is able to “correct with firmness” while not discouraging the child.

“One time, I heard a father in a meeting with married couples say ‘I sometimes have to smack my children a bit, but never in the face so as to not humiliate them,'” Francis said.

“How beautiful!” Francis remarked. “He knows the sense of dignity! He has to punish them but does it justly and moves on.”

The Rev. Thomas Rosica, who collaborates with the Vatican press office, said the pope was obviously not speaking about committing violence or cruelty against a child but rather about “helping someone to grow and mature.”

“Who has not disciplined their child or been disciplined by parents when we are growing up?” Rosica said in an email. “Simply watch Pope Francis when he is with children and let the images and gestures speak for themselves! To infer or distort anything else … reveals a greater problem for those who don’t seem to understand a pope who has ushered in a revolution of normalcy of simple speech and plain gesture.”

The Catholic Church’s position on corporal punishment came under sharp criticism last year during a grilling by members of a U.N. human rights committee monitoring implementation of the U.N. treaty on the rights of the child.

In its final report, the committee members reminded the Holy See that the treaty explicitly requires signatories to take all measures, including legislative and educational, to protect children from all forms of physical or mental violence – including while in the care of parents.

It recommended that the Holy See amend its own laws to specifically prohibit corporal punishment of children, including within the family, and to create ways to enforce that ban in Catholic schools and institutions around the globe.

The recommendations were prompted by reports to the committee of widespread physical abuse and use of corporal punishment in Catholic-run schools and institutions, particularly in Ireland, that committee members said had reached “endemic levels.”

The Vatican had argued that it in no way promoted corporal punishment, but that it also had no way to enforce any kind of ban on its use in Catholic schools, over which it has no jurisdiction. It noted that it was only responsible for implementing the child rights treaty inside the Vatican City State.

That said, it stressed that the term “punishment” isn’t even used in the section of church teaching that refers to parents’ duties to “educate, guide, correct, instruct and discipline” their children.

In its written response to the committee, the Vatican said that according to church teaching, parents “should be able to rectify their child’s inappropriate action by imposing certain reasonable consequences for such behaviour, taking into consideration the child’s ability to understand the same as corrective.”

AFP PHOTO/OSSERVATORE ROMANOIn this handout picture released by the Vatican press office Pope Francis shakes hands with Italy's Interior Minister Angelino Alfano in front of an audience on Feb. 6 at the Vatican.

The head of the Vatican delegation told the committee that he would take the U.N. proposal to ban corporal punishment in all settings back to Rome for consideration.

The Holy See isn’t the only signatory to the convention that has been singled out on the issue. Britain received a similar recommendation to repeal its law allowing parents to spank their kids when it came before the U.N. committee in 2002.

Some 39 countries prohibit corporal punishment in all settings, including at home, where most abuse occurs. Those nations range from Sweden and Germany to South Sudan and Turkmenistan.

In the United States, parents can legally hit their child as long as the force is “reasonable.” In 19 U.S. states, it’s still legal for personnel in schools to practice “paddling.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/holy-post/pope-francis-says-its-ok-to-smack-children-as-long-as-their-dignity-remains-intact-and-it-is-done-justly/feed2stdAnote Tong, FrancisAFP PHOTO/OSSERVATORE ROMANOWhat the Pope meant when he said those who offend could ‘expect a punch’http://news.nationalpost.com/holy-post/what-the-pope-meant-when-he-said-those-who-offend-could-expect-a-punch
http://news.nationalpost.com/holy-post/what-the-pope-meant-when-he-said-those-who-offend-could-expect-a-punch#commentsSat, 17 Jan 2015 01:19:42 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=572698

It happened during one of the informal, even intimate, media sessions for which Pope Francis has become famous: A simple, off-the-cuff remark alluding to the natural human instinct to lash out in response to an attack or insult.

As Pope Francis huddled with friends and reporters on board the papal aircraft en route to the Philippines from Sri Lanka on Thursday, beginning the final leg of his Asian tour, he spoke without notes about the recent Paris terror attacks, and on the often-complex relationship between freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

In responding to a French journalist’s question, Francis said that if “his good friend, Dr. Gasparri,” an organizer of papal trips, who had been standing next to him on the airplane, were to utter an insult against his mother, he could “expect a punch.” Francis then pulled a mock punch in Dr. Gasparri’s direction, commenting further that such a reaction would be expected.

“It’s normal,” he said. “You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”

The remarks raised eyebrows in the Canadian media and worldwide as they seemed not only to go against Christian teachings against violence as a legitimate means of retaliation — “turn the other cheek” — but also to promote limits on free speech just as Europe was rallying around the freedom of expression in the wake of last week’s brutal terrorist attacks in the French capital.

Reverend Thomas Rosica, the English language assistant to the Holy See Press Office, came out strongly in defence of the Pope’s remarks, writing that “the Pope’s expression is in no way intended to be interpreted as a justification for the violence and terror that took place in Paris.”

Rev. Rosica went further in rejecting the notion that Pope Francis meant in any way to contradict the Church’s teachings on non-violence.

“The Pope’s free style of speech, especially in situations like the press conference must be taken at face value and not distorted or manipulated. The Pope has spoken out clearly against the terror and violence that occurred in Paris and in other parts of the world. Violence begets violence. Pope Francis has not advocated violence with his words on the flight,” writes Rev. Rosica.

Other experts, however, questioned elements of the Pope’s comments.

“I think the remarks were very unfortunate, given the mood in Europe. It couldn’t be more poorly timed — I think people are offended by them, and I can see exactly why,” says David Seljak, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo Ont., and an expert in how religions weather, adapt to and participate in dramatic societal changes.

Although the Catholic Church is strong today in preaching resistance to the common human desire to avenge harm and insult, and is a constant voice against the use of violence to solve problems between states and among religions, Prof. Seljak says, the Church has not always found itself bound to the principle of absolute pacifism.

“It’s quite clear about the teachings of Jesus,” explains Prof. Seljak about the Vatican. “Love thine enemy and turn the other cheek — and the early Christians were pacifists. But, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Christians had to re-think their doctrine of absolute pacifism. All of a sudden, you have these outside “barbarian hordes” attacking the Empire. Are you allowed to defend yourself? So they developed the Just War theory. When you’re the religion of an empire, absolute pacifism is a luxury you can’t afford,” Prof. Seljak continues.

And so, while there is in fact precedent in Catholic thought for the justified use of force, Prof. Seljak agrees that the Pope’s commentary on Thursday was by no means intended as a justification for the recent violence witnessed in France.

“Given his condemnation of attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and while his words were unfortunate, it would be irresponsible to interpret them in any way as justifying the attacks in Paris,” says Prof. Seljak.

“I think that’s outside the boundaries of common sense,” he continues.

“I think what he [the Pope] is trying to justify is Muslim anger — anger among moderate Muslims in the face of provocative insults to their faith. He’s saying that it’s normal for members of a faith community to be angry when somebody intentionally goes out of their way to provoke them. In the same way that insulting his mother would lead him to be angry enough to lash out.”

While Prof. Seljak agrees with the spirit of the Vatican’s official response to Pope Francis’ comments, he is not alone in questioning the timing of the statement, or the ease with which the Pope’s comments have led themselves to various interpretations in the media.

“If he’s saying just that insults in fact lead to retaliation, he’s not saying anything in itself anti-Christian,” writes Professor Thomas Hurka of the University of Toronto, a scholar who specializes in moral and political philosophy.

“It’s surprising that he doesn’t criticize this thing that normally happens,” continues Prof. Hurka, referring to the human impulse to strike out against a person who has just insulted you.

“If instead he means that you ought to expect retaliation – so it’s not just likely but also appropriate — that would be very surprising.”

Pope Francis is expected to wrap up his Asian tour in the Phillippines on January 19.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Pope Francis brought calls for reconciliation and justice to Sri Lanka on Tuesday as he began a week-long Asian tour, saying the island nation can’t fully heal from a quarter-century of brutal civil war without pursuing the truth about abuses that were committed.

In a show of ethnic and religious coexistence, the pope’s welcome ceremony at Colombo’s airport featured traditional dancers and drummers from both majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil ethnic groups and a children’s choir serenading him in both of Sri Lanka’s languages.

Representatives of all of Sri Lanka’s main faiths came together to greet the leader of the 1.2-billion strong Catholic Church in a country where Catholics make up less than 7 per cent of the population.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyfVCFGv4iQ&w=620&h=315]

The 78-year-old pope arrived after a 10-hour, overnight flight from Rome and immediately spent nearly two hours under a scorching sun greeting well-wishers. The effects seemed evident, as a delayed Francis skipped a lunchtime meeting with Sri Lanka’s bishops and seemed tired by the end of the grueling first day.

With 40 costumed elephants lining the airport road behind him and a 21-canon salute booming over the tarmac, Francis said that finding true peace after so much bloodshed “can only be done by overcoming evil with good, and by cultivating those virtues which foster reconciliation, solidarity and peace.”

He didn’t specifically mention Sri Lanka’s refusal to co-operate with a U.N. investigation into alleged war crimes committed in the final months of the war. But he said, “The process of healing also needs to include the pursuit of truth, not for the sake of opening old wounds, but rather as a necessary means of promoting justice, healing and unity.”

The process of healing also needs to include the pursuit of truth, not for the sake of opening old wounds, but rather as a necessary means of promoting justice, healing and unity.

Tamil rebels fought a 25-year civil war to demand an independent Tamil nation after decades of perceived discrimination by governments dominated by the Sinhalese majority. U.N. estimates say 80,000 to 100,000 people were killed during the course of the war, which ended in 2009; other reports suggest the toll could be much higher.

A 2011 U.N. report said up to 40,000 Tamil civilians may have been killed in the last months of the civil war, and accused both sides of serious human rights violations. It said the government was suspected of deliberately shelling civilians and hospitals and preventing food and medicine from getting to civilians trapped in the war zone. The rebels were accused of recruiting child soldiers and holding civilians as human shields and firing from among them.

A few months after the U.N. report was released, the government of longtime President Mahinda Rajapaksa released its own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission findings, which concluded that Sri Lanka’s military didn’t intentionally target civilians at the end of the war and that the rebels routinely violated international humanitarian law.

Sri Lanka’s new president, Maithripala Sirisena who unseated Rajapaksa last week, has promised to launch a domestic inquiry into wartime abuses, but has also pledged to protect everyone who contributed to the defeat of the Tamil Tiger separatists from international legal action.

Sirisena, who was sworn in Friday, told Francis in the airport welcoming ceremony that his government aims to promote “peace and friendship among our people after overcoming a cruel terrorist conflict.”

“We are a people who believe in religious tolerance and coexistence based on our centuries-old heritage,” he said.

Tamils, however, say they are still discriminated against, and human rights activists said the previous government wasn’t serious about probing rights abuses.

Thousands of people lined Francis’ 28-kilometre (17-mile) route in from the airport, which he travelled entirely in his open-sided popemobile under a scorching sun. While some who had staked out positions since dawn were frustrated that he sped past so quickly, Francis took so long greeting well-wishers that he cancelled a meeting with Sri Lanka’s bishops in the afternoon after falling more than an hour behind schedule.

“This is like Jesus Christ himself coming to Sri Lanka!” marveled Ranjit Solis, 60, a retired engineer. He recalled that Pope Paul VI only spent two hours in Sri Lanka in 1970, while St. John Paul II spent a day in 1995. “The current pope is coming for three days! He serves the poor and is concerned about poor countries. It’s a great thing.”

Cancelling the bishop meeting also gave Francis more time to rest after the long airport ceremony and hot spin through town. He appeared refreshed when he met with Sirisena privately at the presidential palace in the late afternoon, dragged a bit at the interreligious meeting but then rallied to greet dozens of saffron-robbed Buddhist monks and other religious leaders.

At one point, he even donned a saffron shawl over his shoulders, a traditional Tamil sign of honour.

“What is needed now is healing and unity, not further division and conflict,” Francis told the audience. “It is my hope that interreligious and ecumenical co-operation will demonstrate that men and women do not have to forsake their identity, whether ethnic or religious, in order to live in harmony with their brothers and sisters.”

Some 70 per cent of Sri Lankans are Buddhist — most from the Sinhalese ethnic group. Another 13 per cent are Hindu, most of them Tamil, and some 10 per cent are Muslim. Catholics make up less than 7 per cent of the island nation’s 20 million people, but the church counts both Sinhalese and Tamils as members and sees itself as a strong source of national unity.

When John Paul visited in 1995, Buddhist representatives boycotted his interfaith meeting to protest his views on the Buddhist concept of salvation.

“It is a blessing and will be helpful for interreligious friendship,” said the Rev. Wimalananda, a young Buddhist monk, who was out on the street to welcome the pope.

Francis arrived just days after Rajapaksa was upset in an election he had called. The victor, Sirisena, had defected from the ruling party in November in a surprise move and won the election by capitalizing on Rajapaksa’s unpopularity among ethnic and religious minorities.

Alessandro Di Meo / The Associated PressPope Francis with Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa at the Vatican on Oct. 3. Election ads featuring photos of the president and the Pontiff have caused a stir ahead of a Papal visit to Sri Lanka, with the Catholic Church ordering all campaign material featuring the Pope taken down.

“This is a good opportunity to unify the country after a war and bring together a society divided with an election,” said another Francis watcher on the road in from the airport, Saman Priyankara. “It will be a strength to the new government at a time we are free from an autocracy and on a new path.”

On Wednesday, Francis will canonize Sri Lanka’s first saint, the Rev. Joseph Vaz, a 17th-century missionary from India who is credited with having revived the Catholic faith among both Sinhalese and Tamils amid persecution by Dutch colonial rulers, who were Calvinists. Colombo’s beachfront Galle Face Green was filling up Tuesday evening with people who planned to camp out overnight to secure a good spot for the Mass.

Later in the day he flies into Tamil territory to pray at a shrine beloved by both Sinhalese and Tamil faithful.

On Thursday he heads to the Philippines, the largest Roman Catholic country in Asia and the third-largest in the world, for the second and final leg of the journey.

Even if you’re not a big fan of the Catholic Church, you have to admire Pope Francis. Maybe it says something about how much he differs from other recent popes that, out of 266 pontiffs over 2000 years, there have been 23 Johns, 16 Benedicts and numerous Sixtuses, Innocents and Clements, but he’s the first to pick the name Francis, after Francis of Assisi.

His appellative originality isn’t what makes him appealing, however. What other pope would mark Christmas week by denouncing the Vatican bureaucracy to their faces as a pack of gossiping careerists hopelessly addicted to intrigue, backbiting and self-promotion?

He has a talent for the biting phrase, Francis does. He suggested the Vatican’s all-powerful curia suffers from “spiritual Alzheimers” and spends its time spreading the “terrorism of gossip.” Earlier he sent shock waves through the calcified cranium of Church thinking when, asked about the status of gay priests, he replied, “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?” He mocked the world’s obsessive materialism, noting, “When the stock market drops 10 points in some cities, it constitutes a tragedy. Someone who dies is not news, but lowering income by 10 points is a tragedy! “ He lectured priests on their grimness, complaining, “An evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral. ”

Mohamed Abd El Ghany/REUTERSPresidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi waves to supporters during his campaign tour in Qalyubia Governorate, north of Cairo May 9, 2012. Four new cabinet ministers have been introduced to parliament, but Islamists want a new PM.

He also has a sense of humour. He sloughed off the Church’s pursuit of moral perfectionism by proclaiming, “The perfect family doesn’t exist, nor is there a perfect husband or a perfect wife, and let’s not talk about the perfect mother-in-law! It’s just us sinners.” He even warned the other Cardinals what to expect after they picked him as pope, opening the papal after-party with a stone-faced “May God forgive you for what you’ve done”.

It remains to be seen whether Francis will be any different in dealing with dirty priests.

The Catholic Church isn’t used to this stuff. Recent popes have ranged from the grandfatherly John XXIII to the right-wing rock stardom of John Paul II. Francis’s immediate predecessor, the dour German Benedict XVI got the job after years as the Vatican’s chief hall monitor, the man responsible for making the rules and ensuring everyone obeys. Mr. Warmth he was not, a fact he recognized by becoming the first pontiff ever to take voluntary early retirement.

What none of them did was clean up the mess. Official Church practices – its ban on priests marrying, its medieval treatment of nuns, its wholly unchristian attitude towards gays — remained firmly in place. John Paul II, while enduringly popular (and rushed through to sainthood), treated real reform like a particularly virulent strain of ebola, preferring to seek out palatable explanations for unchanging attitudes. Most of all, the transcendent horror of sexual abuse was treated as an internal embarrassment that could best be handled by keeping things quiet while shifting the guilty to quiet new fields of opportunity.

Frank Gunn/The Canadian PressToronto Blue Jays starting pitcher Mark Buehrle got some key strikeouts to get himself out of jams against the Twins in Friday night.

Francis has made some strong symbolic gestures. He refuses to ride around in the papal limousine, preferring a Ford Focus. He made a show of paying his own bill at a hotel. He uses the old table settings rather than ordering a new set of embossed porcelain like all the other popes, and sleeps in a small apartment rather than the lush Vatican residence available to him. In March he fired a German bishop known as the “Bishop of Bling” for ordering up a palatial new $50 million residence for himself. This month he removed the commander of the Swiss Guards, his ceremonial bodyguards, for being too strict.

It remains to be seen whether Francis will be any different in dealing with dirty priests. Abuse is inevitable in a community that is by nature cloaked in self denial and sexual frustration. The reasonable response would be a change in the Vatican’s fundamental views on sex and the sexes: open the door to marriage, welcome female priests, end the prejudice against gays, enable those who seek to counsel families to gain some actual experience in marriage. Even for a man as seemingly sensible as Francis, that would be a tall order. Probably insurmountable, given the entrenched powers that remain committed to the status quo. It’s also an unfortunate fact that Francis was a reluctant candidate for the papacy and, at 78 (his birthday was last week), understands that the clock is ticking. Perhaps that’s why he is making such a public show of trying to return the Church to the traditions of poverty, humility and sacrifice to which it is supposed to be committed.

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Unfortunately, there is no guarantee his approach will be continued by whoever comes next. Bishops like their perks just as much as the next guy. Bureaucrats don’t like to be lectured, especially if they think they’re working for God. You can’t take an organization that has spent 2000 years constructing an international global conglomerate of faith and alter its ruling culture in a decade or so.

We should enjoy Francis while we can, and wish him a long life. The business of the Catholic Church is eternity, so there’s no guarantee the fresh breeze blowing through Vatican halls will outlive its source.

Last summer, Jorge Mario Bergolio, a middle-class Jesuit from Buenos Aires, better known to most of the world as Pope Francis, sat down in his Vatican office to write two extraordinary letters.

His Holiness had a simple message: To the leaders of the United States and Cuba, he urged rapprochement, an end to conflict and a move toward some kind of peace.

Remarkably, four months later, on Dec. 17, the Pope’s wish came at least partially true. In a surprise press conference this week, U.S. President Barack Obama announced a new, normalized relationship with Cuba.

Next year, for the first time since 1961, the U.S. will open an embassy in Havana. Travel restrictions between the two countries will be eased and commercial ties fostered.

In separate speeches, Mr. Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro praised the pontiff’s intervention. Pope Francis hosted talks between the two sides in the Vatican. More importantly, he served as a key moral and political guarantor for both parties.

“I want to thank His Holiness Pope Francis, whose moral example shows us the importance of pursuing the world as it should be, rather than simply settling for the world as it is,” Mr. Obama said.

The deal represents the most significant diplomatic victory for the Vatican in a generation. And it came about in no small part because of the Pope’s enormous personal popularity.

“It’s hard to say no to him,” said Fr. Thomas Reese, a senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter.

In less than two years as pontiff, Pope Francis has shifted the way much of the world thinks about the Roman Catholic Church. After years church leaders obsessing over abortion, contraception and opposition to gay rights, the pope has set them talking about poverty, economics and peace.

“What I would say is that he’s rebranding the Catholic Church,” said Fr. Reese.

In the process, Pope Francis may be upending a long-time relationship between God and politics in the Western world. The first Jesuit pontiff is opening up space for progressives to embrace the church and its teachings, to use Catholic doctrine as a moral cudgel on the left after decades in which “God” and “conservative” have been near synonyms in the political sphere.

But as a new biography of Pope Francis makes clear, he is no radical or socialist. What he is, instead, is deeply skeptical of fixed ideologies, right, left or otherwise.

“He sees himself as defending ordinary people against the elites. And in a way the left and right thing is an elite argument,” said Austen Ivereigh, author of The Great Reformer, a comprehensive look at the pope’s background and early years. “He wants to root himself and the church in the ordinary concerns of the poor.”

That hasn’t stopped some from trying to brand Pope Francis as a liberal or a Marxist. In fact, one of the reasons Mr. Ivereigh said he wrote the book was to try to correct what he sees as a widespread misinterpretation of the pope’s message.

Pope Francis hasn’t changed church doctrine on the most divisive questions of the age.

“He’s not in favour of gay marriage. He’s not in favour of abortion,” said Mr. Reese. What he’s done instead is re-order some public priorities. “He believes the church should stress firstly mercy,” said Mr. Ivereigh. He also thinks church leaders need to spend more time listening to ordinary people.

That said, while he is no communist, Pope Francis is clearly critical of capitalism.

“He just doesn’t buy the trickle-down theory,” said Fr. Reese. As a bishop in Buenos Aires, he became famous for taking the bus to the slums and visiting the homes of the poor.

“I think he developed a great sckpticism of capitalism and globalization [there]. Maybe Argentina was getting richer at one time, but he didn’t see the poor getting richer.”

SABCFor the second year in a row, <em>Flashpoint</em>, CTV’s action-packed drama about a police tactical unit, has garnered the most Gemini Award nominations, including one for best dramatic series.
The hit show won the award for best dramatic series last year, as well as best director for Kelly Makin and best actor in a continuing series for Enrico Colantoni, after earning a record 19 nominations.
Flashpoint, which has attracted viewers in both Canada and the U.S., where it airs on CBS, leads the 2010 nominations with 15 nods. It faces off against <em>Durham County</em>, <em>Republic of Doyle</em>, <em>Stargate Universe</em> and <em>The Tudors</em> for best dramatic series.
Colantoni is not nominated for his work in <em>Flashpoint</em> but rather a guest role in the new series <em>Cra$h & Burn</em>.
The candidates for best actor in a continuing dramatic role include Michael Riley in <em>Being Erica</em> and Allan Hawco, co-creator, producer and star of the CBC detective dramedy <em>Republic of Doyle</em>.
“The thing that’s had the most lasting impact is people talking about the show and talking about being proud to be Canadian. That was a secret desire of mine in the creation of this show — to tell a story that was set in Canada with no apologies and to have a sense of humour about itself,” Hawco said following the announcement. “It’s a fun-action-adventure- comedy-mystery-drama.”
About 75 people gathered at a downtown Toronto hotel to hear the nominations that recognize the best in Canadian television. Actors Patrick McKenna and Anna Silk read out a select number of the 107 categories. Guests included Jay Manuel, who is nominated for his work hosting <em>Canada’s Next Top Model</em>, and Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies, who is recognized for hosting <em>Ed’s Up</em>, an OLN program where he flies in and out of remote communities.
“I work really hard being a guy in a rock band. Doing the show represented a trade against time with my wife and kids so it was a big deal for me to do it,” Robertson said. “I had a blast making it. I took on the show solely for the flying experience that I would get. I just got to be myself and goof around and have a great time.”
Nominees for best comedy are: <em>Dan For Mayor</em>, <em>Less Than Kind</em>, <em>Little Mosque on the Prairie</em>, <em>Pure Pwnage</em> and <em>Rick Mercer Report</em>.
HBO Canada’s <em>Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures</em>, the CBC minseries <em>Guns</em>, <em>Stargate Universe</em> and <em>The Summit</em> are up for awards in nine categories each.
<em>Dragons’ Den</em>, which picked up the prize for best reality program last year, is nominated in the category again along with <em>Canada’s Next Top Model</em>, <em>The Cupcake Girls</em> and <em>Love It Or List It</em>.
• The Gemini Awards will be broadcast on Nov. 13 on Global and Showcase.

Perhaps because he is so hard to pin down ideologically, Pope Francis has become a lightning rod for criticism from both the left and the right at various times in his career.

In his book, Mr. Ivereigh recreates with painstaking detail the role Fr. Bergolio, then head of the Jesuits in Argentina, played during the “Dirty War” in Argentina. When he first became pope, critics accused him of collaborating with the military junta. Some even said he served up two of his colleagues for assassination.

Mr. Ivereigh believes that account isn’t fair or accurate. It is true Fr. Bergolio did not speak out publicly against the junta. He also opposed the “liberation theologists,” church figures who mixed Catholic theology with Marxist teaching and who were active in Latin America at the time.

But he worked behind the scenes to help potential government targets flee Argentina. According to the account in The Great Reformer, he sheltered many in Jesuit-owned facilities and used Jesuit contacts across South America to smuggle dozens to safety.

To achieve that task, he relied on two things that shape him to this day: secrecy and connections.

“He’s a very canny strategist and he keeps his cards very close to his chest,” said Mr. Ivereigh. “He operates through relationships and quite informally, so there’s never much of a paper trail.”

That tendency was on also display in the recent negotiations. “The restoration of U.S.-Cuba relations came as in incredible surprise,” he added. “It was huge news and very people knew about it. That’s very typical of him.”

Whatever happens behind closed doors, though, Pope Francis clearly intends to keep speaking out publicly on issues usually associated with the political left.

Fr. Reese, a fellow Jesuit, said the pontiff is planning to release an encyclical — a kind of authoritative letter — on the environment in 2015. And as events this week have shown, when this pope speaks, people listen.

“He has returned the Vatican to the centre of the world stage,” Mr. Ivereigh said.